Adult learning is more than alternative education, self-help, self-study, or training. Self-directed inquiry can free you from the cultural traps of today’s postmodern world. When you think for yourself, you take control of your life. Intellectual ability and critical thinking soon become substitutes for paper credentials. Simply stated aggressive learning is the most practical guide to a passionately rewarding life.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

A strong middle class is like
a vegetable garden, requiring a rich economic environment in the same manner
that a garden needs fertile soil. We do not say to seeds, “It’s all up to you. Don’t
worry about the PH factor or the nitrogen or the potassium in the soil. Just do
your thing, seeds.” But this is precisely the economic policy that many people advocate.

Vegetable gardens require
constant care. If their soil is depleted, testing may be necessary to ensure
the right ratio of nutrients. An economy for human beings is infinitely more
complicated than a garden, but vital ingredients like education, living wages,
and hard and soft infrastructure, which are essential for growing and sustaining
a society, are often the first areas that trickle-down proponents suggest for
cost cutting. Rather than testing the soil, they accuse the seeds of lacking
the motivation to grow.

Now let’s move metaphorically
from the garden into the garage where the car is parked. If the car battery is
dead, we don’t drain more voltage, we jump-start it with a powerful charge. If the
car idles briefly but runs out of gas, we have to get fuel from another vehicle
before we can drive. To do this, we prime a syphon hose with a rush of liquid
to get the fuel moving from one tank to the other. Merely getting rid of the
fumes does nothing to solve the underlying problem. Far too often in our
political disputes we lose sight of the fundamental purpose of our efforts to
thrive.

By all existential measures
of human decency, an economy is not more important than its reason for
existence. Its engines need adequate fuel, and our metaphorical garden has to
be sustainable. This means that its long-term viability is more important than
any single harvest or any individual or group.

Thus, the constant
political cry to elect business executives to run the country often misses the
point. The economy is far, far more important than business, although running
the government in a businesslike manner is desirable. To reify capitalism, as
if it is more essential than its reason for being or the people it is supposed
to serve, is a recipe for dysfunction at best and oppression at worst. Sadly,
this misguided ethos lies at the core of our inability to achieve political
equilibrium.

The whole methodology of
reengineering, rightsizing, downsizing, and creating a workforce of temporary
employees was a legal strategy to avoid paying employee benefits. In our garden
analogy this might appear to be efficient, except the result over time has been
extreme soil depletion. Not enough of the profits excised at harvest are
getting back into the ground.

Our garden is not working
for all of us, and the abundance at harvest time is unjustly distributed. Political
power trumps the labor of those whose efforts made the bounty possible. Claims
that unskilled labor is not worthy of a living wage reflect the smoldering arrogance
and contempt of tribalism: Our garden, not theirs. We are deserving; they
aren’t. We have the power to legislate; they don’t.

The U.S. Tax Code is a
finely tuned political instrument shaped with unrelenting influence by moneyed
interests. Slowly but surely, over a period of decades, the tax burden has
shifted to those less able to pay. Fortunes are made via insider trading.
Supercomputers skim the cream off the stock market.

Financial institutions
bleed 401K retirement plans with nickel-and-dime fees that amount to huge sums
of money by the time the funds are actually used for retirement. The banking
industry applies new rules to customer accounts with whack-a-mole frequency by
dreaming up new service charges and hidden fees. Banks can legally charge
eighty dollars for a five-dollar overdraft.

Government subsidies for
big business increase every year. Big Pharma’s lobbying efforts have succeeded
in making it illegal in some cases for the government to negotiate drug prices.
Student loans are guaranteed profit centers that can’t be discharged through
bankruptcy, but corporations routinely use Chapter 11 as a trustworthy way of
shedding debt.

The promise inherent in
the American spirit of self-reliance and faith in hard work obscures the
reality of a system meticulously rigged with carrot-and-stick hype in which the
waving of the stick hides the fact that the carrot is more apparent than real.

Consider the European
experiment with austerity or the state of Kansas, where the governor’s tax
cutting has nearly bankrupted the state. Nothing like the ideology of low, low
taxes and small, small government exists anywhere in the world with a sustained
middle class because it’s analogous to planting a garden in sand.

Our history offers an
indisputable record of how the financial sector has effectively severed the
reward connection between productivity and compensation for work performed. Our
technological future promises a steady increase in the numbers of white-collar
and professional jobs being replaced by software and robotics.

Simply put, if an individual’s
duties can be reduced to an algorithm, they can be replaced with an app. Moreover,
there is nothing on the horizon, save the power of organized labor and an
informed and activist public, to keep the middle class from perpetual, if not exponential,
decline.

Following admirable
instincts emphasizing individual responsibility, lots of people believe in
trickle-down economics. They are not entirely wrong. Individual responsibility
is very important. But over-focusing on the virtue of individuals is inadequate
for our garden economy. Most of us have little difficulty in determining that
our own families are more important than the business of business, and yet
there are many who have great difficulty in applying the same standard to others.
This bias serves as a tool for political manipulation.

The historical economic
record and current state of the economy are proof that trickle down leads to a
disproportionate rate of trickle up. In today’s world, small government is a
euphemism for big corporations with the power to do as they please.

The garden analogy for
our fiscal policy is a reminder of how our social and ecological interconnectedness
is critical for our long-term sustainability. Our growing rate of inequality
demonstrates that we need to plow deep and rethink our garden economy.